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:...
Software Development & Release Management
How to Install the Hudson Continuous Integration Tool on Windows
This week we are going to begin taking a look at Hudson, a widely used continuous build and integration tool. Hudson is a state of the art continuous build tool which now has seen wide adoption for software engineering. Hudson supports most of the more prominent...
How to Migrate a Site using MODX Content Management System
When copying a site from one host to another, you may want to change user, password, database, directory structure or URL -- and when deploying website, you may occasionally run into a new content manager that you need to understand enough to move the site to a new...
Tortoise for Windows — a Better Software Management Option
As part of our software engineering services, I work with a lot of developers taking finished websites and deploying them. When the developer codes, he or she uses what's comfortable to them or what works best with their department. After a number of times trying to...
Tips and Tricks to using Windows 8
I recently upgraded to Windows 8 from Windows 7 on my HP Pavillion dv6 laptop. For me, it was a matter of needing to re-install my system after a hard disk failure. I opted for Windows 8 mainly to test the new operating system. From a feature standpoint, Windows...
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...
Trigger UAC to Ensure Scripts are run As Administrator in Windows 7
I wanted to post this solution since we run into this problem all the time: Often, our .bat scripts include making registry changes or copying files which require Administrative access. This code will cause the .bat file to trigger a UAC prompt before running...
How To Ease Your Agile Development Transition with Custom Dashboards and User Interfaces
At this year's Electric Cloud Summit there was big focus on Agile software development practices. Even a casual look at Electric Cloud's product line, which includes ElectricAccelerator, ElectricCommander, and most recently ElectricDeploy, will make it obvious that...
How to Deal with Single Points of Failure: Hardware
Continuing our series on why economizing in the wrong areas can leave your business at risk, it is time to start considering single points of failure. A single point of failure is a part of your IT and development system, be it human, software, hardware or...
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...
Setting up Seated Licenses in PTC Integrity Lifecycle Manager
When it comes to licensing your PTC Integrity Lifecycle Manager server, you have the option of either purchasing seated licenses, floating licenses, or some combination thereof to service your user community. In this blog, I am going to discuss how to implement seat...