The servers that I’m managing can be divided into two groups, colo and local servers. While most of the configuration has been similar between these two, there have been a growing number of things which I’ve had to configure differently through Puppet. The latest...
Electric Cloud recently released version 8.0 of their build and deployment orchestration tool, Electric Flow. This latest release includes many new features, but the focus of this article will be the ability to retry tasks and stages from a failed pipeline and why...
I’m just going to come out and say it: I drank the Windows Phone 8 Kool-Aid. My coworkers mock me, and I accept this. But darn it, I want to believe! (and it tastes a lot better than what I was drinking before.) And it's certainly better than if I wandered over to the...
Recently I took over DIACAP testing on a few machines. The task of starting DIACAP testing may seem overwhelming when presented with the number of tests and findings you will need to complete. Thankfully, there have been some automated tools released to help aid the...
This week we would like to have a look at some continuous integration best practices. The list presented here is not exhaustive, and was inspired by a larger post on the topic at: http://www.thoughtworks.com/continuous-integration Our purpose is to expand on some of...
Occasionally I’ll get a comment from a potential client who is particularly price sensitive about the rates for our consultants, and the comment usually goes something like: “I can hire a full-time employee who would cost me a lot less than what you are going to...
Is the Windows Phone 8 Ready for the Enterprise? I suppose the short answer would be, 'compared to what?' I've been an Android user, an iPhone user, and now I'm using a Windows Phone 8 -- and I have my gripes about all of them. Of course the real problem is that I...
Here's a common situation: you manage an application; you haven't gone through a release; no patches have been applied (to your knowledge); and the infrastructure guys say that they haven't touched the network in ages. But a user calls, and to your...
Dell Latitude ST This is the Dell Latitude ST, which can be had from the Dell Outlet store for about $300. It’s a 10-inch tablet slate running an Atom Z670 and 2GB of RAM – like a Netbook without a keyboard. Instead, it has an N-trig digitizer that supports both...
Continuous Integration (CI) is a software development methodology that uses small and frequent incremental changes to the code base, which are incorporated into a rapid build and test environment. Each change integrated into the source repository is verified by the...
Automated development, rather than just automated builds, offers a more holistic approach to automating the development process including building, testing and deployment. It is the cornerstone of Continuous Integration (CI). CI uses a model of small incremental...
Why would the average engineer want to create and use a virtual machine on their laptop or workstation? After all, usually an engineer has a perfectly good machine to work with, right? That may be true. Perhaps the engineer may even have access to more than one...
