Redundant and repetitive tasks present a number of challenges for your business. Your engineering team feels bored, like they’re wasting their time. Pretty soon, they’re done being bored and looking for more challenging and rewarding work. With skilled engineers in...
Recently, a customer came to me because they wanted to record when changes were promoted from their development environment to their test environment, and later from their test environment to their production environment. They wanted a way to simply tell when changes...
Automation isn’t just for manufacturing tasks. In fact, many of the grinding, repetitive tasks your engineers can’t stand can easily be automated out of existence. Any task that is repeatable is automatable. That means you can save big money on man hours, letting your...
Git encourages developers to use branches during their development process as a means of coordinating and managing changes to the master branch. Git does not force any particular strategy for doing so and consequently, several popular branching strategies have...
In my initial blog post, I explained a little bit about Nagios, and how it can be configured to monitor any networking device or server. Nagios' basic operation is this: Define a check Execute the check at a specified interval Take the result of the check and...
Everyone loves a one-click installer, but setting this up can be a headache, especially when a company changes the way this is done. You can setup your installation script to install both PADS9.3 and PADS9.3_update1 with a double-click of the mouse! Here are the first...
This week we want to have a look at a useful website that enables us to quickly and accurately install any of a large number of useful software packages. The website, www.ninite.com, presents a large number of current freeware packages, along with trial versions of a...
This week we’d like to cover a tool that assists with understanding what is actually in that desktop or laptop you work with. Most of us know in lesser or greater detail that there is a CPU, some random access memory (RAM) a hard disk drive (HDD), various peripherals...
This seems to be the age of “Big Data”. Every sector seems to have a need for it -- from biotechs doing genome sequencing, to financial providers mining market data. For many, the ability to store massive amounts of structured or unstructured data is the key to...
One of the powerful features of a full enterprise product lifecycle management (PLM) system is being able to post process content uploaded to it. For example, adding a watermark, or changing a revision of a document automatically. The idea behind Solidworks Workgroup...
This week we want to cover a utility that allows users to manage the buildup of files that eat up space on your storage device. We are speaking about WinDirStat, which is a tool that presents a graphical view of your entire storage drive (or from a folder level)....
Often times when I am using PTC Integrity (now PTC Windchill RV&S), I am performing the same or similar tasks over and over again. By default, PTC Integrity offers you something called your Quick Query where you can save a query and run it over and over again. But...